It’s too short for most games I play, because they backload their interest and gameplay excessively. The first two hours are generally the worst example of the actual game. Frustrates me that devs don’t have the sense to make a demo that showcases the game instead of either nothing or just the beginning, but if a dev does the beginning and lets you carry your save into the full game, you can use the demo as intro and then buy with two more hours to put it through its paces (or already know you won’t need to refund). Still not a smart way to sell your game when the early game is worse and a more focused demo would more effectively and efficiently engage potential players who don’t want to sink time into every demo, but it’s a compromise solution for people who will spend time with the demo and not wander away without buying into the game if they had a good time.
Also, anything with a character creator or other such lengthy setup to get playing just doesn’t work with only two hours of running time as the window.
I’m skeptical that there’s a filter like this over the whole game. If you look at the all of the leaked screenshots together none of the others are anywhere close to this dreary to my eye. Although some of the other images have different issues like extreme darkness/low gamma which makes me think some of them were never intended for the public. They have also since been pulled from the site (supposedly this was the original location). Maybe it was a look they were testing at some point and then scrapped, who knows.
I think a lot of these are going to be placeholder for a while until more generalized communities like this one see more growth. It’ll be a while before we even hit 100k subscribers here, and you need to have a subset of those people who are looking to talk about an even more specific interest in more depth.
In principle I agree with you, but it’s also a “chicken and egg” type problem. Many people aren’t going to switch to Lemmy if there isn’t a modicum of coverage for more specialized topics.
I think getting to somewhere beyond 100K MAU will have a transformative effective on activity in some more specialized communities.
On one hand I understand this, but on the other hand I’d like to post games I find that fit these subgenres or talk about that subgenre without making myself the biggest spammer in !games, and I think (time will tell!) I do have the stubbornness necessary to scream into the void until people come along. Maybe I should crosspost the ones I think are most likely to have mass appeal…
I feel if I spontaneously quit all my niche gaming communities and posted everything I’d post there on a general community instead, I’d annoy everyone with a bunch of Steam links for games they probably do not care about. People in the niche communities are more likely to care about a link to a game in a genre they already like. Also, for most of the small communities I’ve got at least one other poster sometimes, and that’s better than nobody! Despite all the trouble with incremental.social and federation, when I can get on there we do have a few regulars chatting there and that’s nice.
contains gender politicsThere’s also just fans of a certain genre being used to backlash from the wider gaming community. I did get mostly upvotes when I posted !otomegames, which is mostly romance visual novels for women who like men, to !newcommunities. I appreciate it. But I am not sure how posting these games to !games would go over, especially when I suspect Lemmy to be male-dominated. Visual novels already suffer from the “it’s all just hentai” stereotype. Now add the “media for women, especially romance media, is stupid and vapid and silly” prejudice. And even for those who just live and let live, I suspect most of the general !games community would be disinterested in otome game posts, which is fair because I’m disinterested in romance and/or sex visual novels aimed at men who want to date women (although they should definitely be allowed to exist and people should be allowed to like them in peace). So both to avoid any backlash, and to avoid annoying the wider community, I don’t want to post those games to this general community. I still want a space for it on Lemmy though, so I made that community. I have one other regular poster and sometimes people drop in and comment.
You could make the argument that I’m simply posting low-quality content, and I’d just have to raise the bar for !games to accept my posts, and that I just want my niches back, to which I say: fair. But unfortunately I’m no video game expert or connoisseur. I play and enjoy. The lovely guide and wiki makers usually get there before I can. I’m not too good at coming up with fun discussion questions that are better than what I’d consider low-tier engagement bait back on Reddit like “name one good thing about [noncontroversial character]”. So link posts it is, better some on-topic content than none at all. And even if I did write a wonderful in-depth review or guide, if it’s not for some big mainstream appeal game but something that only genre enthusiasts really like, not sure how well !games would take to it. So that’s my rationale for having these niche communities. You’re still very free to think I’m wrong ;) Thanks for contributing in earnest to !games!
You’re probably right, but most of these do exist already, so I figure not why not continue trying to use them (and to direct attention from this big community there)? Also probably doesn’t help a lot of instances have general games communities. We’re pretty splintered. Now that I think about it I should probably crosspost to some of the bigger ones.
Communities for Talos Principle and Resident Evil, but again, they aren’t active.
Yeah, there are a bunch of communities for individual video games, but they’re all pretty dead. I think that !pixeldungeon, where the dev actually shows up, posts, and moderates is probably one of the most alive.
This came up when I originally got on the Threadiverse — I remember suggesting that people post in generic gaming communities, then when the load became too high, move to genre-specific, and then when the load became too high, move to game-specific. Otherwise, the userbase in any one community just isn’t large enough to get much community activity.
I agree. In the days immediately following the APIcalypse, people attempted to move all their favourite niche communities to Lemmy, but the site’s active userbase isn’t there yet for that kind of content - much to my displeasure: I was only active in two/three niche communities back when I was a Reddit user, but they are pretty much nonexistent here, so I’m forced to include more generic communities in my Lemmy feed to keep it from drying up.
Evolve stage 2! Very fun and very unique game. Their battle pass monetization scheme fizzled out and they took down the servers. There may be some community run servers going, but getting onto them for a small player base that’s going to beat my ass just doesn’t seem worth.
Nintendo games do that a lot. Most Mario games (some of them in Charles Martinet’s voice), StarFox, Metroid (with occasional thumbs-up/waving at player), F-Zero…
IMHO, two hours is not nearly enough to get a feel for a game. At least, not for the sorts of games I tend to play. I spend longer than that just working through initial technical issues, configuration, and (in games that have one) the character generator.
I have to conclude that Steam’s return window is either intended to be just enough to see if you can get it running, or as much as Valve could talk publishers into tolerating.
imo the 2h refund window is not so you can judge if you’ll like the game, it’s so you can judge if you can tolerate it long enough to form an informed opinion
there’s been a few games i played under 2h of and thought to myself “this is terrible, i’m not having fun and i actively dislike playing this”, Steam’s no questions asked refund was a cure for regret i’d have felt if i had to see that game in my library forever. Games that i know take much longer to judge i borrow from a friend who’s into fitness and a girl, that’s what saved me from buying Starfield or Avowed
Two hours is the length of some high-budget media; eg, movies and plays.
I know that some games are slow-burn, but that’s something people have to weigh themselves. Ideally, you’d enjoy the slow burn itself. When I tried to “force myself through to the Good Part of Nier Automata”, I ended up hating the whole thing.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne